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Police Have Found Most of the $300,000 in Wine Stolen From the French Laundry

Scott Lucas | Photo: Courtesy Wikimedia Commons | January 23, 2015

This concludes tonight's ripped-from-the-headlnes episode of Law and Order: Merlot Unit.

The French Laundry

All but a few of the 76 bottles of high-end wine stolen from The French Laundry on Christmas Day have been recovered by police detectives from Napa County. The bottles—whose total worth topped $300,000 (!)—were discovered in a private cellar in Greensboro, North Carolina, according to the Press Democrat. No arrests have yet been made.

Police officers were reportedly able to solve the case using social media, as well as technologically sophisticated wine tracking and identification devices that had been installed on the bottles. Napa County Sheriff Doug Pike declined to comment further on the case, which is still ongoing.

So that means we're going to have to fill in the details on our own. Bear with us here—this is just the elevator pitch. If you like it, we can have a spec script ready for you on Monday.

Here goes.

We're going to just go ahead and assume the case was broken wide open—like a bottle of cabernet dropped onto the patio—by a mismatched pair of wine detectives.

Syrah Noir (Grey's Anatomy's Caterina Scorsone) is an icy wine queen—a tough but sexy single mother haunted by the unsolved phylloxera infestation of her father's prized zinfandel vineyard. William Bacchus (Mad Men's Kevin Rahm) is a full-bodied sommelier-turned-detective who doesn't play by the rules—he serves red with fish! he doesn't oak his Chardonnays!—but he gets results, dammit.

Together, these Sonoma sleuths solve the wine mysteries that nobody else can: purloined pinots, stolen sangioveses, and taken tempranillos. You know what they say, after all: If you can't do the time, don't steal the wine.